[Gluster-devel] PLEASE READ ! We need your opinion. GSOC-2014 and the Gluster community

[Carlos Capriotti]

Hello, all.

I am a little bit impressed by the lack of action on this topic. I hate to be "that guy", specially being new here, but it has to be done. 

If I've got this right, we have here a chance of developing Gluster even further, sponsored by Google, with a dedicated programmer for the summer. 

In other words, if we play our cards right, we can get a free programmer and at least a good start/advance on this fantastic.

Well, I've checked the trello board, and there is a fair amount of things there.

There are a couple of things that are not there as well.

I think it would be nice to listen to the COMMUNITY (yes, that means YOU), for either suggestions, or at least a vote.

My opinion, being also my vote, in order of PERSONAL preference:

1) There is a project going on (https://forge.gluster.org/disperse), that consists on re-writing the stripe module on gluster. This is specially important because it has a HUGE impact on Total Cost of Implementation (customer side), Total Cost of Ownership, and also matching what the competition has to offer. Among other things, it would allow gluster to implement a RAIDZ/RAID5 type of fault tolerance, much more efficient, and would, as far as I understand, allow you to use 3 nodes as a minimum stripe+replication. This means 25% less money in computer hardware, with increased data safety/resilience.

2) We have a recurring issue with split-brain solution. There is an entry on trello asking/suggesting a mechanism that arbitrates this resolution automatically. I pretty much think this could come together with another solution that is file replication consistency check. 

3) Accelerator node project. Some storage solutions out there offer an "accelerator node", which is, in short, a, extra node with a lot of RAM, eventually fast disks (SSD), and that works like a proxy to the regular volumes. active chunks of files are moved there, logs (ZIL style) are recorded on fast media, among other things. There is NO active project for this, or trello entry, because it is something I started discussing with a few fellows just a couple of days ago. I thought of starting to play with RAM disks (tmpfs) as scratch disks, but, since we have an opportunity to do something more efficient, or at the very least start it, why not ?

Now, c'mon ! Time is running out. We need hands on deck here, for a simple vote ! 

Can you share 3 lines with your thoughts ?

Thanks